


Lacking Only Certain Data

by Masu_Trout



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prey (2017) Fusion, IN SPACE!, M/M, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 06:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20466224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Derrick Walthers is a condemned criminal, doomed to spend the rest the rest of his life behind bars—that is, until TranStar offers him a second chance as a volunteer aboard Talos I. Room, board, a chance to contribute to science... what else could he possibly ask for?(Adam's been undercover for far too long. Time's running out, his leads are starting to feel like dead ends—and things only get stranger when a new volunteer who knows more than he should takes a liking to Adam.)





	Lacking Only Certain Data

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacehopper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/gifts).

> This work contains midgame and endgame spoilers for Prey.

**Volunteer Information:** V-010004-51

**Name:** [REDACTED]  
**DOB:** 3/09/93  
**Gender:** Male  
**Race: **White  
**Admission Date:** 12/21/33  
**Institution:** Penly T. Housefather Correctional, USA

**OFFENSE INFORMATION**  
Armed Robbery  
Assault With a Deadly Weapon  
Murder in the First Degree, Three Counts

The name they sent him in under was Derrick Walthers, but it didn't take Adam more than a day to realize that wouldn't matter; he was a number here. He could demand to be called anything he wanted, Derrick or Adam or fucking Alex Yu—at best, it would earn him a few rolled eyes from the staff. At worst, an electric prod to the chest. The guards could be generous about giving those out.

The only two things that stood out about him here were his accent and the enhancements that weaved through his body; the first marked him as an outsider among the almost entirely Soviet group of _volunteers_, and the second made him especially interesting to the scientists aboard Talos I. Every last one of them wanted to know how the cybernetics in his body affected his organic parts' functioning, how long he could stay awake, what his body's psychochemistry looked like. 

Every part of Adam that could still hurt—the top layers of skin on chest, his jaw, his torso, his spine and the muscles of his back—was hurting, and there was never a moment anymore when skin around his augmented eyes wasn't bruised and sore from the needles they liked to slide into the skin there. From what bits of overly-technical conversation that Adam could actually understand, cranial augmentations didn't play well with neuromods. He was their best chance yet at fixing that particular design flaw.

All in all, he'd had better assignments.

_Three hundred and fifty days_, he reminded himself, lying there in the dark and staring at the ceiling of his capsule bunk only a few inches above his head. He was already more than halfway through.

Adam brushed a hand over his eye—still aching—and then pressed his fingers against the base of his skull to feel the small, awkward lump there. Just another of the dozens upon dozens of implants he carried, too many for the staff at Talos I to count, unremarkable except for what it could do. After two years in the program he'd be allowed back down to Earth; three hundred and fifty more days of this and he'd be able to bring the data he was carefully storing back to TF29.

Assuming, of course, that he managed to gather enough to be useful to TF29. Posing as a volunteer was their only chance of getting someone up here, but it left him without good opportunities to collect data. The volunteers were hardly ever left alone, or even let out of their tiny quarters and the associated labs; there were massive parts of the station he'd only ever heard of in passing.

(Assuming, of course, that he made it two years.)

Above him, the lights flicked on; he flinched away from the halogen glow as a droning voice echoed out, "6:00 AM. All volunteer personnel report to the cafeteria."

The opening to his capsule clicked open and began to slide upward. Adam sighed, chanced one last gentle touch to the implant on his neck, and swung his legs over the side of his bunk.

Three hundred and fifty days. He'd make it. He had to.

* * *

Breakfast was a grim affair; Adam couldn't understand most of what was being passed in muttered whispers up and down the rows, but he didn't need to know Russian to see that there were two more empty seats at the tables than there had been yesterday. That made for three people gone this week, and it was only Thursday.

Adam poked at a particularly rubbery chunk of eel, knowing he needed the protein but not especially willing to eat it. When he'd first come here his biggest worry had been what they would give him—he hadn't understood how the neuromod injections worked, and didn't want _more_ cybernetics pushed into his body—but by now he'd learned to be much more frightened of what they were taking away. Adam had undergone blood samples and marrow samples, been poked and prodded from the cold discomfort of a sterile white room, spent more time under anesthesia than he liked to think about… It felt like was back on that operating table again, having more and more pieces of himself cut away until what was left seemed too little to survive with. 

His enhancements had filled those spaces in the first time around, let him survive whether he wanted to or not. He wasn't sure if he'd manage that a second time.

His fork slipped into the gap between the eel's skin and meat. Fat glistened on the scales, greasy and half-congealed—

"Hey, you going to eat that?"

Adam looked up.

A stranger had settled into the seat across from Adam and was watching him with a smile that looked just a little too bright to be real. He couldn't have been much older than twenty-five or twenty-six, with bangs that fell limply into his face and loosely-hanging earlobes stretched to fit gauges that Talos I hadn't let him keep. One hand drummed nervously against the cafeteria table; the other was missing entirely. The right sleeve of his green-and-white uniform had been pinned at the shoulder.

Adam hesitated a moment, but it didn't seem like a trap—just someone too new to the system to realize that avoiding Adam would be the better option. He pushed his plate over to the stranger and watched as he fell upon the chunks of fried eel like a starving animal.

"You are the _best_," he sighed once he'd finished, sucking the last of the grease off the tips of his fingers. 

"Well, if you think so, I could use a favor."

The stranger froze, eyeing the empty plate as if he was debating trying to give the eel back. "...What is it?"

The fear was as plain on his face as his excitement had been. _How,_ Adam thought, watching him, _did you survive long enough to get sent up here?_

Adam shrugged, trying to look nonthreatening—not an easy feat for someone with as much metal as he had. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the more crowded section of the volunteers' cafeteria. "You know what they're saying?"

"Oh—oh! Wow, that accent's real, huh? Not too many Americans on this side of the observation glass. I thought they must've injected it into you." He pantomimed pressing a neuromod injector up against his own eye as he spoke.

"Not really possible." Adam tapped a synthetic eye with a synthetic finger. "No access point." 

At least for now. Hopefully that would stay true; if they ever managed to poke around in his memories, they weren't going to like what they found.

For a moment, the stranger just stared at him, his expression gone flat and unreadable. Then he shook himself and pasted a smile back over his face. "Ah, man, you're so lucky. I've been here, what a week? Maybe two? And I think my eyes are going to ooze out of my head at this rate." 

They _did_ both look unnervingly bloodshot. 

Adam didn't let himself feel sorry for the man. It wouldn't help either of them. "The conversation?" he reminded him.

"Oh! Um, right, yeah, it's… let's see…"

He launched into an impressively quick translation, muttering under his breath, gesturing towards each of the men at the more populated section of the cafeteria as he went. "Big guy on the end there, with the scar, was talking about, uh… seventy-six going missing?"

"Volunteer seventy-six."

The stranger winced. "Right. _Volunteer._. Well, Seventy-Six is gone, and he was saying that it's because he got caught hiding vodka in his bunk, but that guy"—he flicked his fingers at Eighty-Three, a tall Byelorussian man with a face split by scars—"says that isn't it. Says he'd been going crazy for weeks now, he probably lost it and killed Nineteen and that's why they've both disappeared."

"Hm." 

Just gossip, then, same as ever. The scientists—whenever they bothered to give an explanation for a volunteer's disappearance—always claimed early release, or health issues, or an _unfortunate accident_. The scientists also didn't like to look any of the volunteers in the face.

Something was happening to those men. Something deliberate. Adam needed to know what that was before his time here was up, and he needed to figure it out _without_ ending up on the receiving end of whatever it might be.

A harsh, ear-piercing tone echoed from the speakers overhead; breakfast was over. The rest of the men, still grumbling to each other, began to gather up their trays and head towards the doors.

Adam stood too, and a moment later the stranger followed his lead, tray clutched awkwardly in his one hand. 

Two weeks he'd been here, he'd said, and probably most of it spent locked up in one of the station's observation rooms being poked and prodded and tested for every disease under the sun before he could join the general population.

Adam wouldn't feel sorry for him. He couldn't afford to.

The stranger glanced nervously around the room, eyes flicking from the doors to Adam to the rest of the crowd and back again, and Adam sighed. 

"Follow me," he said, "I'll show you where you need to go."

* * *

Adam had gained himself a shadow. A twitchy, nervous, and above all very _talkative_ shadow.

At some point in the last two weeks, the stranger (who wasn't much of a stranger anymore, really) should have realized Adam was a bad choice for protection. The rest of the prisoners mostly left him alone, kept at bay by his scowl or the metal of his limbs, but they left him _alone_; he didn't get any of the volunteer gossip about guard rotations or scientists' schedules, he had no access to contraband, and he ended up on the jobs no one wanted whenever the volunteers did work around the facility. He was as fully on the outskirts as it was possible to be… and, for some reason, Adam's shadow had decided he wanted nothing more in life than to be there with him.

His number was V-122459-13, Thirteen for short, and his name started with _Václav Ko—_; that was as much as he'd been able to get out, his second day in the main group, before Adam had slapped a metal hand over his mouth and growled, "_Don't_."

His off-red eyes had gone wide, and he'd glanced down at the fingers pressed over his lips with something that didn't look like fear. 

"But," he'd said, when Adam finally moved his hand away.

"I don't want to hear it. You're not supposed to talk about that here. We all need to put our pasts aside."

He'd rolled his eyes and murmured back, quiet enough that the guard across the hall wouldn't hear, "You really believe that shit?"

Of course he didn't. But he couldn't explain here, with guards all around and any other volunteer walking by a potential informant for them, what he did believe.

He believed the Talos I researchers when they said that _of course_ they'd never punish anyone for talking about their history prior to arriving here; it was all meant for the volunteers' own good, after all, and the only ones they were harming by refusing to let go of the crimes they'd committed down on Earth were themselves. He also believed his own eyes and ears when they told him that the once who spoke most about who they'd been were the likeliest to disappear.

No way to whisper that all and be understood, so he'd just glared harder until _Václav Ko—_, number 11, had laughed and shook his head and said, "All right, all right, whatever you say."

He hadn't tried talking about the past with Adam again, but he also hadn't stopped talking to him. And Adam—dangerously, stupidly, no matter that he only did it in the privacy of his own head—had started thinking of him as _Václav_.

Today was a holiday somewhere down on planet Earth—Bahrain Independence Day, maybe, or Vaisakhi, he could hardly keep track of time anymore—which meant a rare day out of the labs for both of them; no prodding at Adam's enhancements and no needles going into Václav's ever-reddening eyes. 

Instead, they'd been put on kitchen duty. Or, more specifically, eel duty. Just them and a pair of dull plastic blades and buckets upon buckets of raw sea monster that needed deboning.

It wasn't a quick task, especially with Václav as a partner, but Adam wasn't complaining. He'd take ten hours of eel gore over half that time spent with someone else and the rest of the day cooped up in his claustrophobic bunk. The kitchen was quiet and relatively free of surveillance, and the company… well, the company could be worse.

"—Fucking stupid," Václav was saying, struggling to pin the belly of the eel with his elbow while he drove the plastic knife in. "They're afraid to let us read the books we want or talk about our lives, but then they go and give us these? What if I decide to snap and stick this in you, huh? What if I decide to take us both out, if this goddamn _piece of crap decides not to work_—"

"Here," Adam said, dropping his own eel on the counter and reaching over to steady Václav's instead. "Let me help." And then, looking at Václav, letting just the barest hint of a far-too-dangerous smile cross his face, added, "And you couldn't."

Sometimes he was too much; he talked back to guards, he let his mouth run, he didn't know how to keep himself out of trouble. Sometimes, though, he was exactly enough. He reminded Adam that life outside this prison still existed.

"Huh?"

"Kill me. I think I'd win that round."

He'd expected Václav to bristle; instead, he grinned. "Yeah, you would, wouldn't you? Or, ah, you _should_, anyway." He caught Adam's hand where it was holding the eel; his gloved fingers left smears of blood across the back of Adam's palm. "Can't say I've seen you use these yet."

His touch lingered; his eyes were fixed on Adam's hands. 

Adam had caught him staring at the enhancements before. He'd always assumed it was fear. Augment, enhanced, cyborg, ‘bot—there were a lot of words for what Adam was, and all of them meant _not quite human_. This, though…

Adam very deliberately made whatever this was businesslike again, flipping his hands over to show the masses of electronics wired into the base of each wrist that kept him tame. "There's not too much I can do."

"Huh." Václav wrapped his hand around one of Adam's wrists, pulling it closer to the dim light. "That's, what, an neuro-inhibitor? One of the Tai Yong models, I think? Hard to tell if it's version eight or nine…"

It was version nine; Chang had helped Adam install it, the day before he became _Derrick Walthers_ and then _V-010004-51_. It was also very much _not_ something a layman ought to be able to recognize.

"How do you know that?" 

Václav grinned. "I thought you didn't want me talking about myself?"

Adam scowled. Václav's smile grew.

"Look," Adam sighed, and then, before could catch himself, "Václav—"

They both froze. 

_Stupid_. He lectured Václav about danger, and then he slipped up the second the two of them had the barest hint of freedom from the guards. This place was getting to him. "...Sorry."

"Ah, man, you kidding? That's the best thing you've ever said to me. Don't tell me it doesn't drive you crazy not to hear your own name."

"You get used to it."

"Uh-huh. Okay, tough guy." Václav rolled his eyes, still grinning, and said, "Look, if you really want to know, I'm like you. Or at least I used to be." He nodded down towards his shoulder and the pinned-up sleeve. "Fuckers didn't let me keep my arm when they shipped me off here."

"Huh," Adam said. Now that he was looking for it, it made a lot of sense. Václav didn't move with the confidence of someone used to working with one arm. 

Maybe he should count himself lucky no one had tried to confiscate any of his body—but then, how could they? If someone stripped the metal out of him, they'd be taking more than they left behind.

"I used to be good, too. Augmentation's basically my whole life. I worked on all kinds of enhancements back on Earth: augs, nat-prosthetics, neuromods…" There was a faraway look in his eye. Adam couldn't help but wonder what he was seeing. "You know people call Talos I the neurotech research hub of the world? I used to dream about making it up here. What a fucking joke. I mean, don't get me wrong, I wasn't an angel—I had my problems, you know? Some of my clients were…" He shook his head. "But I never did anything half as fucking evil as what these people are doing to us now."

It took Adam a moment to make the connection. It wasn't exactly unusual for volunteers to complain about the scientists or the unfairness of being sent here. But the nervousness in Václav's face, the way he spoke about the researchers here… "You know what they're doing in the labs."

Václav winced. "I know enough. I know…" He cut himself off with a hiss and glanced uncomfortably around the room.

Adam followed his line of sight. The kitchen's thick walls felt oppressive, suddenly, less a shelter from the guards and more a prison within a prison. He'd guessed there were fewer cameras here, but without his augs active it wasn't as if he could tell—they could be listening right now, watching his and Václav's every move and deciding what to do about a pair of volunteers who talked to much.

He pitched his voice low, leaned in close enough for his breath to ghost over Václav's skin. "Please. Whatever you know…"

"It's—complicated. Trust me, man, you'll think I'm crazy if I don't manage to explain it right."

"I won't," Adam said, and then, realizing the moment it came out of his mouth how dangerously true it was, "And I do trust you."

Maybe it was just being locked up in here so long; the first sign of a friendly face was toppling all his well-honed defenses. But Václav seemed—honest. Quirky, at the very least, and clearly sent here for _some_ kind of reason, but a good person beyond all that.

Václav sighed, still staring at Adam. If he leaned forward just a little more, they'd be skin-to-skin. "Look," he murmured. "Not here, okay? Not now. I need—somewhere safer. Where we're sure we won't be watched."

_When?_ Adam wanted to ask, but he knew better than to push. Václav was his best chance so far, and Václav was clearly _terrified_. He had no more reason to trust Adam than Adam did to trust him, and yet here they both were: leaning over a dead eel, close enough to touch, discussing secrets that TranStar would surely kill them both for knowing.

"Okay," Adam said. "Later. We'll figure it out."

He pulled back to a safe distance, to where he wouldn't be taunting himself with Václav's closeness. (It wasn't _Václav_ specifically, it was just—how long had it been since he'd last felt someone else's skin? Before he'd ended up on Talos I, at the very least.)

Václav looked at him, gratitude plain on his face, and said, "Okay, yeah. We will, won't we?"

He sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than anyone else. Adam nodded anyway.

The rest of the day was spent in cold, tense, _fishy_ silence; Adam cut into eels until he was glad he didn't have hands that could tire, watching Václav out of the corner of his eye as often as he could get away with.

He looked… exhausted. Older than he had only a few weeks ago, with his eyes bloodshot and the bags underneath them heavy and bruise-dark.

Three hundred and twenty-two days, Adam reminded himself. The count kept shrinking, and here was his best lead yet. He needed to learn what Václav knew and bring that information back to Earth. He couldn't afford to worry over anything else. But—

Adam frowned and turned back to his work. 

"Václav?" he said, finally, when the guards were about to come by and he couldn't hesitate any longer.

He looked up, his face dotted with splatters of eel blood. "Yeah?"

The smart thing would be to lie. The _smarter_ thing would be to stay quiet. But instead he opened mouth and said, "My name's Adam. Just so you know."

The grin Václav gave him then was the most genuine thing Adam had seen since he'd been sent up here.

"Adam," he said, his accent giving the vowels a strange sort of shape. "_Adam_. I like it. Feels good to hear it, doesn't it?"

It did. It felt like being human again.

* * *

Adam had been worried, when they left the kitchen that evening, that it would be their one chance wasted. The volunteers here ate in groups, showered in groups, and slept in bunks that locked from the outside; what time were he and Václav going to get alone together?

The answer came one afternoon in late February, with a blown-out power fuse and the day's ended early and a new wave of gossip spreading like wildfire around the volunteer quarters.

"Someone died," Václav murmured to Adam, his voice dripping with satisfaction. "One of the scientists. It was some kind of lab test gone wrong, he just started screaming."

They were sitting on the edge of Adam's bunk, a few careful inches apart, watching the chaos slowly spread through the room. For once, Adam's status was helping—even as the shouting grew louder, no one was paying the least bit of attention to either of them.

The guards had come by the Neuromod Labs earlier, while Adam was in the middle of trying to keep his breathing steady as a pair of researchers poked around inside his arms, and ordered him back to the volunteer quarters. He hadn't expected Václav to be sent back too—he always got shipped over to Psychotronics for testing—but apparently they'd recalled _every_ prisoner.

Something big was happening. Bigger than a single scientist's death.

"Is that what they're saying?" Adam frowned. "Are any of them sure?"

"That's what _I'm_ saying. I heard him screaming, even from rooms away." He smiled. "I think it was Dr. Bellamy. Whatever it was, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."

Adam glanced around the room. The background noise was too loud for any individual voice to be picked out, and if the guards were paying attention they'd be in here already—the volunteers, packed into the sleeping quarters in the middle of the day with no explanation and no supervision, were already about halfway to starting a riot.

"Václav," Adam asked, "can you talk to me now?"

It took Václav a moment; he stared at Adam, confused, and then his eyes widened and he glanced towards the sealed-shut doors.

"Okay," he said, "I—yeah, I can. But, Adam"—he sucked in a breath between his teeth—"it's, ah… I don't think you're going to like it."

Adam stared him down, wishing more than ever that his augs were active; the glasses would be helpful right now.

"All right, All right." Václav waved his hand Adam's way. "Look. How much do you know about neuromods?"

"Needles, brains. They make you smarter."

"Okay, that's—a summary. But I mean, yeah, they teach you things. All sorts of fun new neural pathways building themselves in your brain, _bam!_ just like that. You know what happens when you remove them?"

"You can't," Adam said immediately. "It isn't possible." Sarif Industries had never been in the neuromod business—even Sarif himself hadn't been able to reverse-engineer the designs—but Adam remembered enough from his time there to know _that_. 

Václav snorted. "Adam. I worked for the fucking Georgian mafia for half a decade. I _did_ those operations. When there's money on the line, everything's possible."

"You worked..?" Adam clamped down on his surprise with a shake of his head. Not like he hadn't known Václav had a history, and now wasn't the time. "So? You… what, lose the skills from the mod?"

"The brain doesn't pick and choose like that. You pull a mod out, it reverts _everything_. Complete factory reset. Right back to the day you first got it put in."

"Wait—"

"_Yeah_."

Adam had wondered, occasionally, why the researchers seemed so eager to give new volunteers neuromods. They were expensive, exclusive... and yet no one ever showed up in the volunteer quarters who hadn't had one injected already. He'd thought it was more research, or maybe some strange attempt at reducing recidivism.

All along, it had just been insurance. You couldn't tell anyone what had happened to you here if you couldn't even remember it.

"I'm not losing two years," Václav snarled quietly. "They don't get to get to pick through my brain and use me like that. And you…"

Adam brushed his hand his eye socket, and then against the back of his neck. TF29's recording chip sat there still, nestled deep into the intersection of flesh and metal. He had never gotten a neuromod. He'd thought that made him lucky. Now… 

They weren't planning on letting him go back to Earth, no matter how much he worked to blend in. He'd serve his sentence right up until the moment they'd have to set him free, and then he'd disappear. Would it be an accident, he wondered, or would they try to set him up for something? Or maybe they'd claim he'd been released and sent safely back to Earth.

_Shit_. How many of the volunteers ever even made it back to Earth? They were ninety percent Soviets, for all TranStar was an international corporation, and it wasn't as if the government there was releasing statistics. It had taken TF29 long enough to even catch that something might be wrong up here—they wouldn't have any idea about the scope of the disappearances.

Adam frowned. "We have to get back to Earth."

_I_ have to make it back, some distant part of him interjected, but that voice barely even registered. Like hell he was leaving Václav behind.

"And that's not the only thi—what? Make it _back_?" Václav blinked at him, startled. "How? You've seen the guards. We can't exactly just waltz on down the hall into an escape pod and tell it to bring us home."

Adam flipped his hands palm-up, showing off the neuro-inhibitors. "You think you could get these things off?"

"Huh," Václav said. "I… _huh_. With the right equipment, yeah. But if there's somewhere outside Psychotronics that has that equipment, I don't know where it is."

If he could get his augs back he could contact TF29, figure out… something. But getting himself into the Psychotronics labs without access to his augs would be hard enough; bringing Václav along with him tipped that over into very nearly impossible.

"Look," Adam said, "I—"

There was a screech at the door to the sleeping quarters.

It wasn't natural; it wasn't _right_. It sounded like metal against metal and like an animal being torn apart.

A hush fell over the room, every volunteer turning towards the source of the noise. 

"What the fuck?" someone muttered in Russian, one of the few phrases Adam could recognize, and then— 

The door crumpled, electronic lock giving with a shrill noise and reinforced carbon falling to pieces like tissue paper, as _something_ stepped through it.

It was the size of a full-grown man. It had two arms, and two legs, and a head. It looked… 

Adam stared at the thing—the shadows licking at its shifting form; the two bright eyes gleaming from inside a face made of smoke; the stumbling way it pulled itself through the wreckage of the doorway, like it wasn't quite sure how to walk—but couldn't wrap his mind around it. It was the most alien thing he'd ever seen in its life, and perfectly, hideously, human.

_I…_, the monster said, in a voice that crawled through Adam's ears and down his spine, _I do trust you. I want to go home. I want—_

"Oh," Václav said quietly, "so I'm not crazy. Great."

Its body was shifting: the claws growing longer, the eyes growing brighter. Adam grabbed Václav's hand and pulled them both towards the side of the room just as the thing leapt forward. 

The were was a shout from behind him—first just one, a high-pitched howl of pain, and then a chorus of panic began to spread through the room. Adam didn't turn back, even as the noise behind him exploded into screams of pain and fear and rage. The creature had left the door undefended, if he just got them _out_—

Adam made it through the door and kept running through the rest of the Volunteer Quarters, tugging Václav along behind him as he went. The lights flickered dimly; here and there he could see splatters of blood or deep gouges in the space stations walls and floor.

It was going to be a massacre in the sleeping quarters. _Fuck_.

Adam came to a halt in a hall just outside the Volunteer Quarters, glancing at the paths that branched off all around him. Václav was breathing heavily at his side, sweat dripping down his face.

"Are you okay?" Adam asked, finally letting his hand drop. 

One hand on Václav's back, he guided them both to a alcove full of plants a few feet down the hall—home to a diorama on TranStar's biological diversity up until earlier today, by the looks of it. Shattered glass crunched under his feet as he pressed up against the far wall, but at least this way they'd have a chance to avoid that monster if it ever stumbled back in their direction.

Václav nodded. "Yeah, I just"—he sucked in a deep breath, his one hand shaking—"holy shit, man. I knew something fucked up was going on here, but I didn't… ugh." He shook his head. "I kept hearing things in the lab, you know? Just barely. Like static from another room. And the neuromods made it louder and louder. I thought they were just turning my brain to goo, but that… that's one of the things that was talking. I'm sure of it."

"There's more of them?" Adam asked, and then, "They've _been_ here?"

He hadn't even considered that it might not be some sudden attack, aliens turning out to be real in the worst way possible; had he been sharing a station with these things all along?

Václav nodded. "This is going to sound so messed-up, but, uh—people break open neuromods sometimes, you know? To try and figure them out, or just on accident. I did it a couple times, back on Earth. And there's materials in there that… I mean, I didn't know how TranStar ever constructed them. Like nothing on Earth."

Adam recoiled. "You really think—"

"I wish I didn't, trust me. Don't get me wrong—injectable alien goo would normally be _fucking cool_. But right now, ah"—he scratched at the corner of one of his blood-red eyes—"It doesn't feel great. I just…" He paused, looking up at Adam with fear plain on his face. "That thing in there. It looked like a person, didn't it?"

"Václav…"

"Look." Václav grabbed one of Adam's hands and clutched it tight. "I'm not taking them out, okay? I'd rather die than forget. And I know that's risky, so all I'm saying is if things started to get weirder—if I, you know, start acting wrong—"

"No." he word slipped out before he could even think it through. It made sense for Václav to ask; who knew what those neuromods might mean for him now that the world had gone insane? But wasn't going to lose Václav. "That's not going to happen. We'll get to the labs, and get out of here. I have—contacts."

Government contacts, which Václav wasn't going to like. And Miller wouldn't like Adam bringing a Soviet gang doctor back to Allied Earth. But right now he was beyond worrying about that; whatever TranStar was doing, this had become bigger than a single mission the moment that monster burst through the door. TF29 had people aboard the various satellites and small-scale stations in orbit. One of them would have a way to get him back to Earth—and he was bringing Václav with him no matter what.

"Adam, seriously, you should—"

"No," Adam said again, and kissed him.

It was a bad idea. The worst he'd had in years, and he'd volunteered to go undercover on Talos I. But Václav's mouth was soft and warm, and when Adam's lips brushed his he made a surprised little noise and grabbed Adam's hair to pull him in closer.

He didn't want to think about how long it had been since he'd last touched another person, didn't want to think about where they were or what he'd seen to day. For a second it was just him and Václav—no prison, no experiments, no monsters.

They broke apart after only a moment, both of them breathing hard. Václav's hand tightened in Adam's hair before letting go.

"You know," he said, "I was already going to fix your augs up. You didn't need to convince me."

"You should've told me that before," Adam said, earning him a weak little laugh from Václav. "It's not safe here. You know how to get to the Psychotronics labs?"

"Yeah. Or, at least"—he grimaced and tapped his forehead—"I think I learned it. With, uh, some of the memories. If it works it works, right?"

Another thing to worry about. But… later. 

Adam took a deep breath, flexing his fingers—imagining them working properly again, imagining finally having his augs spark back to life after more than a year without them—and let Václav take the lead as they stepped out of the alcove.

"Okay," he said, "let's go."

* * *

_(after)_

"Fuck," Václav hissed, wrist-deep in the corpse of a scavenged Operator, "I think it's already—ah, wait, here we go," and with a triumphant grin he pulled his hand free with a small, metallic chip clenched tightly between two equally-metallic fingers.

"It's working, then?" Adam asked. Salvaging himself a new arm had been Václav's top priority from the moment they'd stepped back onto Earth soil, above even things like 'eating', 'sleeping', or 'not getting murdered by aliens'—which, given how he'd been aboard Talos I, really shouldn't have taken Adam by surprise. The augment he'd finally managed to pull together was the skeletons of at least three different designs awkwardly Frankensteined together, topped off with a haphazard coat of bright red spray paint, and Václav's mood had improved thousands of times over since the moment he got it attached.

At least someone was feeling optimistic, he supposed. It was nice to see a smiling face occasionally; they weren't too many things to smile about these days.

Václav nodded, and wiggled his fingers for emphasis. "Grip strength could use some work, but that's something I can fix. And I think I've got the parts to equip that psychoscope now too."

"Good."

Václav had been more right than either of them ever could have imagined: that thing they'd seen in the volunteers' quarters hadn't been the only monster. Not by a long, _long_ shot. People were reflexively checking everything these days—clothing and food and tools, every last piece of equipment anyone used—and still the mimics slipped by. At least with some psychoscopes, they stood more of a chance of finding them _before_ anyone else got their face ripped off.

Adam swept aside enough space on Václav's cluttered workbench for him to sit down, then pressed his hands the bridge of his nose as he settled into his makeshift seat. "We should've destroyed Talos I."

He'd spent so long dreaming of being free of the Yu family's sick experiments, of finally making it back to Earth—and now that he had solid ground under his feet again, Tf29's next assignment was to help refugees evacuate onto TranStar-provided shuttles and TranStar-branded stations. The Earth was falling to the aliens, and there was nothing any of them could do about it.

"That would've been _awesome_," Václav said, and then he looked over at Adam and the bright manic-edged grin slipped off his face. "But it wouldn't have changed things. You know that, right? The moment they started breeding Typhon, we were all fucked."

"Maybe," said Adam.

"Nah, I'm serious—I mean, sure, we could've blown some up, but the space isn't so scary when you don't need to breathe. These things are built better than us." He flexed his augmented hand, then looked over at Adam's augments. "Well, better than some of us, anyway. But we're going to have to play the long game if we want to survive."

"How are you so calm about this?"

"_Calm_? I'm fucking terrified, man. Every moment I'm awake. But, take it from someone who's used to running around under the heel of bastards bigger than me—there's always a chance to strike back, if you just survive long enough to see it." He nudged Adam in the side, his jagged-edged elbow almost sharp enough to draw blood. "Against the Typhon, _and_ against those TranStar bastards."

Adam sighed. He hadn't talked to anyone at TF29, Miller or Argento or Chang or that therapist they'd shipped in from another squad, about what he'd seen aboard the station. The Typhon were running them all ragged; everything else had become meaningless in the face of that overwhelming threat, and they were taking anyone willing to help—whether that was a Soviet ex-gangster or the company who'd been responsible for all of this in the first place. 

It had been an assignment, nothing more. A good agent would forget it about it and focus on the mission at hand.

Václav, though... Václav understood. He might be the only other person left who knew how _wrong_ it was to trust TranStar with anyone's lives. And—he was right. Survive, endure, wait for a chance to tear them down from the inside. It was all Adam could do.

Adam leaned closer and let his head fall against the curve of Václav's shoulder. Metal and skin pressed against his cheek; Václav smelled like sweat and grease and steel. Familiar. More comforting than it had any right to be.

"Yeah," Václav sighed. "Sucks, right?" He twisted around just enough to press an awkward kiss against the side of Adam's head. "But, hey. We're alive."

Adam snorted. "True."

Sometimes he still wondered—out of everyone onboard the station, why did he get to live? But Václav... 

He glanced over at Václav. Eyes still faintly bloodshot even weeks later, face drawn, a tired smile on his tired face. Alive. If saving Václav was the only part of this nightmare of a mission he ever managed to get right, he would take it.

Adam closed his eyes, just for a moment, and listened to the sounds of Václav's body: the whirring of servos and gears, the steady beat of his heart, his soft breathing. It was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Two great games with themes that complement each other amazingly well—I just had to try my hand at this, and I hope you enjoy the end result!


End file.
